Tourism is a vibrant practice in the United States as well as in foreign countries for vacationers. For some cities and states, tourism also provides much needed economic activity that helps improve the quality of life for its residents. As a result, many tourist attractions, including those in the entertainment and hospitality industry, have been set up to cater to tourists as they visit various attractions located in particular cities. Such attractions include guided tours, museums, amusement parks, hotel resorts, and novelty gift shops.
To assist tourists in facilitating their enjoyment of certain attractions, systems have been developed to allow tourists to visit and obtain access to such attractions using a pass system. Examples of such systems include a transaction system for tourist attractions comprising a plurality of merchant terminals at respective attractions and a plurality of pass cards. In this system, each card is loaded with a token which defines the attributes of the pass or passes provided by the card. Each merchant terminal can write data to the cards to amend the tokens or to add new tokens. This system allows customers to re-use existing cards at tourist attractions worldwide. The system also enables the activities of the customer to be controlled in accordance with their previous activities which are stored on the card. The present invention provides a number of improvements upon such systems, as will be described in further detail below.